Die and Google Takes Care of Your Family

Published at 3:24 PM PDT on Aug 10, 2012

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If you work for Google, the company takes care of your family even if you die. Google's benefits are being used even in an employee's afterlife.

Google employees already get plenty of perks: free haircuts, free commuting, great food, on-site health clinics, but apparently its death benefit is also pretty awesome, according to Forbes.

Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock told Forbes that the company gives the surviving spouse or domestic partner of a Google employee 50 percent of that employee's salary every year for the next decade10 years. Any children will also receive a $1,000 monthly payment until they reach 19 or if a full-time student, age 23. (Because there's no service requirement, almost all 34,000 employees are covered.)

“One of the things we realized recently was that one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some point most of us will be confronted with the death of our partners,” Bock told Forbes. “And it’s a horrible, difficult time no matter what, and every time we went through this as a company we tried to find ways to help the surviving spouse of the Googler who’d passed away.”

Back in the old days, this would be called a pension -- but that's something so anachronistic in this corporate age that few people use the word. However, we think it's great that Google is a company that cares enough about its employees that it truly wants to take care of their families in their stead. If only most of the corporate world worked the same way.